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Keith Williams Architects, Unicorn Theatre for Children, London, 2005The main auditorium is in the shape of a Greek amphitheatre, creating an intimate setting and allowingunrestricted views of the stage throughout.

Theatre BeyondChild’s Play

Howard Watson describes how at London Bridge, Keith WilliamsArchitects has produced a permanent home for the UnicornTheatre for Children with ‘a grown-up building for kids’. Devoid ofprimary colours or Disneyesque spectacle, its elegant, intelligentdesign is tailored to the practical requirements of its audience, butsubtly inspires ‘with innovative, surprising touches’.

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One of the smaller buildings that formpart of the huge ‘More London’ project,the regeneration of the Tooley Street areaof London Bridge, is also one of its mostarchitecturally successful. Master-plannedby Foster & Partners, More London isreportedly the largest commercialdevelopment in London since CanaryWharf, and includes 279,000 squaremetres (3 million square feet) of officeand retail space (as well as a depressinglybland Hilton hotel). Some of the officebuildings and new public spaces prove tobe relatively interesting, but it is a smalltheatre on the development’s perimeterthat really catches the eye.

Designed by Keith Williams, theUnicorn Theatre is the first purpose-built children’s theatre in the UK, whichhas given the architect a fresh chance tothink innovatively about the form,structure and mood of this type ofbuilding. The result is rather surprising.The Unicorn theatre company hadseveral short-lived and shoe-hornedassociations with particular venues,most notably the Arts Theatre in theWest End, but has finally come to restin a building that celebrates thecompany’s new-found permanence witha graceful solidity.

The exterior of the building isimpressive, sincere and interesting. It ismade up of a series of boxes withprojected elements and uses a widerange of materials, with off-whiterendering, steel cladding, dark-greybrickwork, blue tiling and glazingestablishing its different components.Most notably, preoxidised coppercladding covers the entrance facade andalso stretches inside across the foyerceiling. Outside, the copper forms a boxthat projects from the main body of thebuilding and has a certain grandeurthat announces the theatre entrance.Framed by this copper, a glazed boxbursts further out to form an overhang.There is another glazed, bar-like box –the actors’ green room – that breaksthrough the rendered, street-side facade.Suspended above street level, it providesviews down the street for the actors,

turning convention on its head sincegreen rooms are usually secret worldsburied deep within a theatre.

The extensive use of glazingemphasises the theatre’s involvementwith its environment and its desire tobecome an integral part of thecommunity. It also lets in an unusualamount of natural light for a buildinggenre that traditionally shuts out theworld, improving office and rehearsalspaces for staff and performers. Theprojected elements push the buildingout to converse with its surroundingsand are particularly fitting for an artform that focuses on the projected voiceand storytelling.

One would think that, at least inside,the design would pander to shortattention spans, but it doesn’t. TheUnicorn is a ‘grown-up building forkids’, as Keith Williams calls it, whichmanages to combine a surprisingdignity and veracity without being tooaustere. This is a world free of brightcolours, big round shapes, plastic playareas and gaudy baubles. ‘We decidedearly on that it wouldn’t be the rightthing to do,’ Williams says. ‘In no waydoes the work [of the theatre company]try to patronise children’ – and thebuilding reflects this.

The programmes cater for childrenaged four to 12, a wide age group forboth logistical and aesthetic reasons. A12-year-old would soon tire of (or at thevery least feel patronised by) a spacedesigned for a four-year-old. Since thecompany wants children to keep onreturning as they grow up, without everfeeling that they have outgrown theplace, children are thus catered for in aseries of small gestures that aid, ratherthan detract from, the aesthetic of thebuilding. The fact that the design wasinfluenced by a three-year consultationwith children at a local school makes itssense of composure all the moresurprising. While design for childrenoften seems to be aimed at those withthe shortest attention spans, theUnicorn raises the bar, with stoneflooring, walnut furnishings, white

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9 year old

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Unicorn Passage

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KEY 1 - 340 Seat Weston Theatre 2 - 120 Seat Clore Theatre 3 - Foyer 4 - Meeting Room 5 - Rehearsal Room 6 - Offices 7 - Dressing Rooms 8 - Wardrobe 9 - Wcs/Plant/Storage10 - Scene Dock11 - Scene Lift12 - Café13 - Box Office14 - Stage Door15 - Green Room16 - Education Studio17 - Void

KEY1 - 340 Seat Weston Theatre2 - 120 Seat Clore Theatre3 - Foyer4 - Meeting Room5 - Rehearsal Room6 - Offices7 - Dressing Rooms8 - Wardrobe9 - Wcs/Plant/Storage

Section AA

Stage level: thrust stage mode

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plaster and exposed concrete – amixture of materials that follows thebrief of the Unicorn’s artistic director,Tony Graham, who wanted something‘rough and beautiful at the same time’.

The two entrance doors, set in a glassbox at right angles to, and part of, theglazed facade of the ground floor, are alittle difficult to find, and hold a certainamount of risk for overenthusiasticchildren. Inside, at one end of the L-shaped foyer, is a very adult, walnut-themed café-bar. Walnut benches havepurple-blue panel insets, and with low,revolving purple pouffes provide themajor splash of colour. Set within thestone floor, a large panel of clear glasslooks down on David Cotterrell’sUnderworld installation, a computerprojection of images of the sky glimpsedthrough buildings. It is intriguing foradults and captivating for children, who

are the first to brave stepping into thecentre of the glass panel for a betterview; and representative of the overallstance of the Unicorn – inspiringchildren with innovative, surprisingtouches, the unfolding of a story ratherthan ‘crash bang wallop’ effects. Such anonpatronising approach ensures thatadults are more readily drawn into thegame. Other gestures include a walnutframe on the wall, which for adults isan art exhibit, but for a six-year-old is aperfectly sized seat. The right-handsection of the foyer is dominated by aconcrete staircase that twists upwardstowards the main auditorium like aprocession route to the theatricaladventure.

The Unicorn has a small, black-boxstudio theatre with a capacity of 110 aswell as the main 350-seat WestonTheatre. For the latter, Tony Graham

was hoping to create a space that hasboth ‘fabulous intimacy and epicquality’. After all the linearity of theouter shell of the building and itsfacilities, it is surprising to discover thatthe Weston is curved in the style of aGreek amphitheatre, giving animmediate intimacy to the space andfollowing the ‘tree in a clearing’ approachwhereby the audience naturally cupsaround the focal point – the storyteller.

Throughout the Weston, thearchitect has shied away from thetheatre aesthetics of the Victorian andEdwardian era: there is no trace of redand gold plushness, while the idea of aformal proscenium arch around theperformance area, thereby presentingtheatre as a picture book, has beenabandoned in favour of greaterintegration. With children in mind, thelowest seats are in a very shallow pitthat sits only a little below the level ofthe stage, thus front-row punters do nothave to permanently crick their necksupwards to get a view of the players.This shallow pit is embraced by twowalkways that reach out directly fromthe stage so that the performers canbring the play into the audience,maximising the interactivity of theperformance. Beyond the arc of thiswalkway, two levels of raked, curvedseating rise quite steeply, so even thefurthest seat is still near to the action.All in blue, the seating is made up ofunnumbered banquettes that take intoaccount children’s free-form spatialrelationships, which often contrast withadult preferences for regimented order.In addition, the low seat-backs meanthat the views of four-year-olds are lesslikely to be obscured, and thebanquettes are on sturdy steel framesthat should survive rough-and-tumble.

In a happy accident, unbeknown toboth architect and client, the roadrunning alongside the theatre, downtowards the Thames, was called UnicornPassage in the 18th century. Here, theUnicorn theatre has found permanencein an ideal place that seems destined tosuit the company’s intent. 4+

The exterior of the theatre is made up of a series of projecting boxes in contrasting materials. The mainentrance is set within the glazing underneath the preoxidised copper-clad box.